Articles in category: Cutting-Edge Tech

As a messaging app, Google's new Allo isn't great. Specifically, it's functionally indistinguishable from any number of apps that have been around for years. But there's one reason why you should want to use Allo every day: artificial intelligence.

Analysts say a handful of technologies are poised to change our lives by 2021. While Forrester Research sees 15 emerging technologies that are important right now, five of them could shake things up in a big way for businesses and the public in general, according to Forrester.

Starting today, Google Drive features Natural Language Processing to make it even easier to find that buried spreadsheet or long-lost docs. The search box in Drive now allows for easy, human-oriented search queries like "find my budget spreadsheet from last December" or "show me presentations from Anissa."

It looks like Google, which yesterday acquired API.ai, a company that helps developers build conversational interfaces, isn’t the only major tech company hoovering up chat bot talent. TechCrunch understands that Angel.ai (formerly known as GoButler) has, at least partially, been acqui-hired by Amazon.

Researchers from MIT attempting to solve this problem have come up with some very impressive results, using specially trained neural networks to turn images into videos and getting the computer to essentially predict what happens next. Their model has plenty of limitations — the videos are seconds long, tiny, and often nightmarish — but it’s still an impressive feat of machine imagination, and another step toward computers that understand the world a little more like humans.

One of America’s leading experts on the technology of government is Bill Eggers, the executive director of Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights. Eggers’ great observation, articulated in his new book Delivering on Digital, is that digital technology offers a unique opportunity for American government to reinvent itself.

Delphi and Mobileye, two heavy hitters in the world of autonomous vehicle technology, have announced that they are partnering to jointly develop a self-driving system that automakers will be able to integrate into their cars starting 2019. For those who came in late: Delphi is one of the auto industry’s biggest parts suppliers. In 2014, it showed off an Audi SQ5 fitted with a self-driving system developed in-house, that allowed the vehicle to successfully navigate through 3,000 miles on its own.

It's long been known that secret messages can be included in music through techniques such as backmasking, but now a Polish researcher has developed an entirely new approach. By subtly varying the tempo of a particular type of dance music, he's managed to encode information in a way that's completely inaudible to human listeners.

Ford is planning to release fully autonomous cars within five years. The cars will have no brake or gas pedals, and be devoid of a steering wheel. In Ford’s view, we’ll get in, sit down and enjoy the ride. But there are no vehicles to show off yet. Instead of a product announcement, Ford simply proclaims it wants to make self-driving cars, and feels it can position them for ride-sharing service like Uber and Lyft.

A machine intelligence system, dubbed Emma AI, is starting a fund that hopes to outsmart the humans and computers that make a living trading stocks. It’s part of a wave of tech startups aiming advanced machine learning at financial markets.

For the millions upon millions of visually impaired people in India, it can be difficult getting hold of the audiobook they want in the language they need it in. A project from Carnegie Mellon University and partners aims to fix that with a free, easily extensible Android app that can be quickly trained to read texts aloud in local languages.

IBM scientists have created artificial neurons and synapses using phase change memory (PCM) that mimics the brain's cognitive learning capability.It is the first time the researchers were able to create what they described as "randomly spiking neurons" using phase-change materials to store and process data. The discovery is a milestone in developing energy-sipping and highly dense neuro networks that could be used for cognitive computing applications.

A startup that helps businesses determine when drones are flying unwantedly or otherwise into their airspace, Dedrone, has partnered with the electronics division of civil aircraft manufacturers Airbus to bring drone detection to wide open spaces and remote locations. Through their partnership, Dedrone will integrate Airbus’s long range radar technology into its systems which are comprised of ground-based sensors and data analytics and reporting software in the cloud.

If you are interested in IoT, today's news about the launch of Density, a new people-counting sensor that has been created by alums from Apple and the Y Combinator accelerator, should catch your attention. Density is a small sensor that anonymously measures how busy a location is in real-time. In practice, with the device mounted above an entryway, a business can use the Density API to access how many people have visited.

Let’s unwrap IBM’s offering and explore how your technology team will benefit from this advancement. Think back. Remember the time you experienced your first Lego kit? It wasn’t just a stationary plastic toy, used for construction. These bricks lived and breathed — they came to life. Anything can be created with Legos, from people that talk to mythical creatures and even entire villages that launch spaceships. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

AI will take jobs away, yes. But it will also fill them on a scale never before possible, where they are needed most: healthcare and education, to start. The brutal fact is that low-income countries suffer from an extreme lack of doctors and educators. Even in developed countries, segments of the population have far less access to these services, most often because of the narrow availability of quality, affordable options.

AR/VR is still in the first of the four stages of tech market development (hype cycle, facing reality, liftoff, sustainable market). Its installed base, from low-end Cardboard through high-end HoloLens, is unlikely to top 100 million until 2018. So how can AR/VR startups survive when long-term AR/VR business models won’t have the scale they need to thrive for 18-24 months? You just need to know where to look. So let’s look.

Because of often minor (and sometimes major) differences between locations, environments, equipment, personnel, processes and many other factors, the solutions put together in one context often do not work in another. Early adopters of Internet of Things products and technologies in business environments have started to discover that these scale challenges are very real. As a result, their IoT deployments are moving at a much slower pace than they originally hoped. In fact, many organizations are still in the POC (proof of concept) stage for IoT, even after several years of trying.

Gartner has predicted that by 2018, a full 30 percent of our interactions with technology will be through “conversations” with smart machines. As we increasingly rely on intelligent systems and welcome them into our daily routine, it’s imperative that we are able to implicitly trust them. Inevitably, as we push the boundaries of AI, there will be more mistakes and more stumbles. The real question is whether or not the dozens of emerging players in the bot market will go to great enough lengths to earn the trust of their users.

Intelligent computers that can make decisions like humans may someday​ be on Hewlett Packard Enterprise's product roadmap. HPE's ultimate goal is to create computer chips that can compute quickly and make decisions based on probabilities and associations, much like how the brain operates. While it will take years for such chips to be commercially available, HPE is testing its brain-like computing model through a prototype system with circuit boards and memory chips. The computer is designed to operate in a way that the brain’s neurons and synapses work.

The biggest tech trend setters in the world have been picking up speed and setting new benchmarks in a growing field, with Google recently providing open access to its new enterprise-level speech recognition API. As China’s largest search engine, Baidu has collected thousands of hours of voice-based data in Mandarin, which was fed to its latest speech recognition engine Deep Speech 2. Alibaba and Tencent are two other key players in the Chinese market developing speech recognition technology.

One-fourth of new users of smartwatches and other wearables say their devices failed to meet their expectations, according to a survey by communications technology company Ericsson. About 10% of all users of wearables have abandoned their devices. Of those who abandoned their devices, 21% said wearables were too limited in their functionality, with too heavy an emphasis on fitness and health apps instead of apps that increase their safety and security or perform other functions.